Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: 6 November 2006

James writes to gentoo-user asking about the possibility of making his Gentoo
machine dual boot with Windows XP while having installed Gentoo first. He was
worried that, having installed Windows, it would overwrite the MBR and thus
render his Gentoo installation inaccessible. Gentoo users responded by saying
that doing it this way would be as simple as first installing Windows, then
booting into a Live CD, and reinstalling GRUB from there. Mark Shields posted
this summary of what to do when you're back in the Live CD:

A gentle reminder about an upcoming IRC meeting led to an interesting
debate about the nature of Gentoo and a lesson on how to deploy it in
an enterprise environment.

Steve Long proposed that Gentoo create a binary-only repository in a
limited series of flavors (SOHO, medium size and large business),
using the binaries that the devs compile in the course of their
maintenance work. He felt this was the best way to demonstrate Gentoo
was serious about enterprise adoption.

Grant Goodyear countered that Steve underestimated the difficulties of,
and overestimated the devs' interest in maintaining, a binary repo. Instead,
Gentoo should build on its strengths as a meta-distribution to allow users to
build and deploy their own custom distributions using Catalyst.

Stuart Herbert pointed out that he and others would be happy to ease the way
for "flavored" enterprise adoption by providing binaries to the "Seeds" effort
and that a binary-only distribution was as prone to breakage as a source-based
one.

Robin Johnson pointed out that his compiles as a dev were of little use to
others, as there were too many aspects that were peculiar to his systems. He
also provided insights gleaned from his experiences using Gentoo in a corporate
environment. He noted that enterprises need customization at an enterprise
level, in that they may use LDAP or Kerberos or whatever enterprise-wide. They
also need standardized binaries to deploy within the enterprise. His solution
was to have one "tinderbox" machine to take care of compilation and then push
out the resulting binaries throughout the enterprise. He accomplishes this
using Catalyst and custom specfiles. The largest deployment he's done using
this plan consists of an impressive array of machines.

John Jawed had been using Gentoo to create an initrd to be used in PXE boots
across the network. The size of the initrd was critical, since a large file
caused kernel panics. He slimmed down the initrd by removing all man and doc
pages. He then prepared a patch to portage to implement this.

Responders noted that the functionality was already present
in /etc/make.conf.

Christian Heim referred John to the "noman" and "nodoc" FEATURES flags, Tobias
Scherbaum to the "noinfo" FEATURE flag. Brian Jackson pointed out the
INSTALL_MASK flag which allows one prevent any of a space delimited list of
files to be copied into the filesystem, allowing one to filter out files like
HACKING.gz and TODO.gz

Italy's open-source movement organized a national Linux Day on the 28th of October. This
was also the 4th time that the ever-growing Italian Gentoo users community were
able to prepare for some evangelism of their own. This year, the national
meeting called Gentoo Day was
organized in collaboration with the GLUG
(Genuense Linux Users Group). Thanks to the help of local authorities, the
event was held at Palazzo Ducale, Piazza De Ferrari, in the city of Genova.

The brave evangelists, all members of the association Gentoo Channel Italia (GeCHI), presented many
talks targetted at both
home and professional audiences. Some of the talks included: "Photo Manipulation
with OSS", "Free your Ipod: use RockBox", "XGL for fun and profit", and
"Practical uses of Gentoo in business environments".

Author (and Gentoo developer) Kris Kersey reviews Intel's first quad-core
processor, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700. The review uses 64-bit Gentoo Linux for
all benchmarks. The new CPU scored impressively: emerge mozilla-firefox
took less than 8 minutes with MAKEOPTS="-j5". If you're in the market for the
best single desktop CPU that money can buy, this one is the current champion.

With the diverse array of overlays now available to the community, one of
the issues a person might have is finding that overlay that is just right
for the package they are looking to install. Unfortunately, the default search
capabilities of portage are only able to search though overlays that have
already been installed on your system. Stefan Schweizer has written an
excellent article at his Planet Gentoo blog this week detailing the workings
of a tool that makes searching through remote overlays a much easier task than
ever before.

The package for this task is app-portage/eix. You will need to unmask it
to get all the latest and greatest features:

Code Listing 4.1: Installing app-portage/eix

# echo app-portage/eix >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# emerge eix

Then, to make sure that eix has all the information it needs about all the
available overlays, you can issue the following commands to update it:

Code Listing 4.2: Updating eix's global overlay list

# update-eix
# update-eix-remote update

eix is now able to search for packages in all of the available overlays in
the global layman list as well the official portage tree.

On amd64 systems, you can use media-video/mplayer-bin to play multimedia
files that require 32-bit only codecs (win32codecs), but mplayer doesn't look
as good as the 64-bit native version and it doesn't integrate very well with
the system. KDE users can emerge kmplayer – a KDE based "front end". If
you use konqueror, kmplayer adds a plugin to the browser. For this tip to
work, you will need to unmerge your native mplayer, if you have it. When you
install kmplayer it will not work as there is no /usr/bin/mplayer.

Code Listing 4.4: Creating the mplayer link

ln -sf /usr/bin/mplayer-bin /usr/local/bin/mplayer

Now, the native kmplayer will play wmv files and you can "preview" them in
konqueror.

The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track
bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the
development team. Between 29 October 2006
and 05 November 2006, activity on the site has resulted in:

866 new bugs during this period

546 bugs closed or resolved during this period

19 previously closed bugs were reopened this period

154 closed as NEEDINFO/WONTFIX/CANTFIX/INVALID/UPSTREAM during this period

200 bugs marked as duplicates during this period

Of the 10999 currently open bugs: 30 are labeled 'blocker', 107 are labeled
'critical', and 514 are labeled 'major'.

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